Tuesday’s Tip: SearchTempest.com

I’ve already discussed a couple of finds I acquired by searching eBay, but there’s another site out there that can offer a treasure trove of family items — Craigslist. This is a site for folks to post items for sale, services offered, etc. It has a notorious reputation for certain of its listings, but that shouldn’t deter you from looking for family heirlooms therein.

Craigslist can be hard to search because it will try to zero in to your locality. You can force it to bring up sites for other locations, but it’s hard to search them all at one time.

Enter SearchTempest.com. This site allows you to search for items on Craigslist and eBay across a wide geographic area.

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I entered my last name and zip code on the homepage, but set the “within” option to 3500 miles. This brought up search results on Craiglist from a variety of areas. It also gave me a list of localities where items were not found, which could come in handy in certain circumstances. I liked the way the Craigslist results were separated out by locality.

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I learned about this service at a training session I attended last week by AIIP member Cynthia Hetherington. Genealogy was not the topic of the session, but you never know where sites like this will come in handy in our trade!

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2 thoughts on “Tuesday’s Tip: SearchTempest.com”

I like yourlist even more than searchtempest (and tons better than CL!). The site is very user-friendly, easy to use, and – functionality-wise – is just all-around better than other sites that search craigslist.